The architect transforming cities into ‘vertical forests’

Architect Stefano Boeri has always been obsessed with trees. The Italian traces his fascination back to a novel he read as a child, “Il Barone Rampante” (“The Baron in the Trees”), in which a young boy climbs up into a world of trees and vows to never to return.
“I think trees are individuals,” Boeri said in a phone interview. “Each has its own evolution, its own biography, its own shape.”

Unsurprisingly, there is child-like wonder to the architect’s best-known building, Il Bosco Verticale, or the Vertical Forest. Built in his home city of Milan, the celebrated complex teems with greenery, its facades transformed into living, breathing organisms.

The project’s two residential towers — measuring 80 meters (262 feet) and 112 meters (367 feet) respectively — play host to around 20,000 trees, shrubs and plants. They spill out from irregularly placed balconies and crawl up the structures’ sides. By Boeri’s estimates, there are two trees, eight shrubs, and 40 plants for each human inhabitant.

The purported benefits of this garden architecture transcend aesthetics. Greenery, supposedly, provides shade to apartments, psychological benefits to residents and a home to wildlife. (There are, Boeri said, “hundreds of birds, more than 15 different species” nesting on the towers’ various floors.)
But the architect’s proudest claim is that the buildings absorb 30 tons of carbon dioxide and produce 19 tons of oxygen a year, according to his research, with a volume of trees equivalent to more than 215,000 square feet of forestland…

In September, Vertical Forest was named among four finalists for the RIBA International Prize, a biennial award honoring the world’s best new buildings. Amid the plaudits, Boeri claims the project’s real success is that it serves as a prototype.
The architect has far more ambitious designs. His firm has already unveiled plans for new Vertical Forest buildings in European cities including Treviso in Italy, Lausanne in Switzerland and Utrecht in the Netherlands.

In the Chinese city of Liuzhou, Guangxi province, he has masterminded an entire “Forest City,” scheduled for completion in 2020, which comprises tree-covered houses, hospitals, schools and office blocks over a sprawling 15-million-square-foot site. (Boeri said that he’s also been approached about producing similar “cities” in Egypt and Mexico.)